From Our Readers

From Our Readers

The spokesman for the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security’s claim that “the department has received no public feedback about the plan” to start dog sniff searches in Massachusetts prison waiting rooms (“Critics Fight Dog Searches of Prison Visitors,” May 3, 2013) is just plain not true.

Massachusetts residents have been calling in to express their concern about this harmful proposal ever since it was first announced. As we detailed in our March 21, 2013 letter to Massachusetts Department of Corrections Commissioner Louis S. Spencer, the dog sniffing policy will unnecessarily deter family visits and thereby make it harder for people released from custody to successfully rejoin their communities. (Our letter is available online at:http://www.prisonpolicy.org/articles/dogs.html.)

The Massachusetts residents who are concerned about this policy and the nation’s leading correctional professional organizations all agree that correctional facilities should encourage, not discourage, community members who wish to visit their loved ones in prison. The dog sniffing policy should be canceled immediately.

Peter Wagner

Executive Director, Prison Policy Initiative

Easthampton

Different Strokes

In response to Yana Tallon-Hicks’ May 9 column (“It’s OK to Go Monogo”): There are lots of different ways of being monogamous, poly, or open—and lots of relationship options aside from the mono/poly spectrum. For instance, in addition to being polyamorous, I prefer living solo (as a free agent, no primary partner). I don’t subscribe to the default setting that I need to have any intimate relationships—or that relationships are only “serious” or “real” if shacking up is in the future.

All relationship options, including celibacy, are potentially good, healthy, rewarding, fulfilling, fun, and exciting—or not. It just depends on the people involved, and the reasons for their choice. I think knowing your options is the key. Just sticking to default settings without even considering that other options exist, and that they might work really well, is a pretty lazy strategy for anything in life. And it certainly doesn’t make for good relationships. Like Rush said: “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

Aggie Sez

via email

Props for O’Malley

I commend Cardinal Sean O’Malley for boycotting Boston College’s commencement due to the college’s decision to bestow an honorary degree on the militant anti-life, pro-abortion Prime Minister of Ireland, Edna Kenny.

Legalized abortion is a true ecological disaster that has been unleashed throughout the globe and is turning it into a planet of death. Both our governments and mainstream media have gone to great lengths to hide the fact that abortion is really murder.

Contrary to conventional wisdom the human embryo is not a potential human being but a human being with potential. The reality is that human life begins at conception with the creation of a zygote, the first embryonic stage. This zygote contains the full genetic instructions that will guide the development of the human person through the continuum of stages we call foetus, baby, child, adult, old person.

The respect for every human life is an essential condition if a societal life worthy of the name is to be possible. When man’s conscience loses respect for life as something sacred, he inevitably ends by losing his own identity. To choose to extinguish in cold blood a life given by God to another person, to reduce to dust and ashes the body of a human being made in His image and likeness, should make us shudder.

To claim the right to abortion and to recognize that right in law means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true freedom.